Jill Bonovitz
bio press links e-mail
1

2

3

4

5

6

7


Rice, Robin. “Layers and Doodles: Extremes of subtlety at Helen Drutt.” Philadelphia City Paper, December 29, 1999–January 5, 1990, 8.

A small group of large vessels by Jill Bonovitz at Helen Drutt Gallery offers a very personal handling of the ceramic medium as a vehicle for non-functional expression.

The shapes are clearly those of shallow containers: wide flattish circular bowls plus one or two with a deeper cupped and squared-off silhouette. To place something in the bowls would be to obscure the central portion of Bonovitz’s “test” – which, in this case includes actual words and phrases.

Most potters glaze the clay with a chemical solution which melts like glass when fired. Bonovitz, like the ancient Greek potters, decorates her work with colored “slips,” which are solutions of finely ground cay and water which bond with the clay body but do not melt at high temperatures.

These complex layers of slip veil her thin-walled structures and suggest an elaborate quest for expression – even though the final form that expression takes remains tentative and sketchy. A piece of which is edged in burnished greyed lavender slip has an interior of cool damp-looking white.

Invisible underlayers of other – often darker – slips provide a nubby, drip-textured, occasionally cracked surface with records a real evolution of thought.

The supposed functional nature of pottery tends to remove it from serious consideration as high art while asserting its right to exist. Bonovitz’s work embraces this contradiction, and others as well, all of which are enriching rather than limiting.

The work is not functional. At first glace the large forms look quite solid because sometimes the walls tend to curve back upon themselves, in a broad flange – a thick hollow rim. Closer inspection reveals the fabric as disturbingly fragile. Often the thin walls have raggedy drippy-looking edges which could snap easily.

This vulnerability s especially appropriate, for a sense of the fragility of human life is on one of the themes evoked by Bonovitz’s work.

The layered slips with which Bonovitz builds up the surface in as many as five firings are nearly invisible. She often draws through the top layer revealing a dark underlayer, but, as in all questions of life, much is forever hidden. The pale colors – peaches, greys, and yellows – are not springlike, but cool and contemplative, almost distancing. There is a suggestion of grief, but also of harmonious acceptance in these colors.

GentleHush is a pale pink bowl, circular in form with a squared center. Wavelike patterns in grey are complemented by the barely decipherable scattered words. “I wake in a large space listening to the gentle hush of waves.”

Water imagery also appears in Rain, the earliest work in the series, a grey bowl with tiny sections of lighter dots. Secretly perhaps contains a landscape and buildings highlighted in soft pinkish dabs within its cool lemon borders.